Marxist criticism

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Criticism based on the historical, economic, and sociological theory
of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Marxism, the consciousness
of a given class at a given historical moment derives from modes of material
production. The set of beliefs, values, attitudes, and ideas that constitutes
the consciousness of this class forms an ideological superstructure, and
this ideological superstructure is shaped and determined by the material
infrastructure or economic base. Hence the term "historical materialism."
Marxism assumes the ontological priority of matter over mind and sees mind
as the product of historical forces. There is thus a dialectical relationship
between the literary work and its sociohistorical background. Dialectical
criticism focuses on the causal connections between the content or
form of a literary work and the economic, class, social, or ideological
factors that shape and determine that content or form. Bourgeois writers,
for example, inevitably propagate a bourgeois ideology that seeks to universalize
the status quo, to see it as natural rather than historical. The notion
that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the class consciousness
of the writer, the ideology of the work, and
the sociohistorical background out of which it emerges is often labeled
vulgar Marxism, even by Marxists themselves. Sophisticated Marxism, however,
as Fredric Jameson points out, is concerned with "the influence of
a given social raw material, not only on the content, but on the very form
of the works themselves.... [The dialectical interaction of work and background],
this fact of sheer interrelationship, is prior to any of the conceptual
categories, such as causality, reflection, or analogy, subsequently evoked
to explain it."

Marxist criticism is by no means a monolith. Georg Lukacs, for example,
praises realism but attacks modernism, seeing
the latter, with its stream-of-consciousness techniques, as a decadent
and desperate retreat into subjectivity, a feckless denial of the objective
reality of class conflict and social contradictions, and an inadvertent
testimony to the alienated state of the individual in mass society. The
Frankfurt School, on the other hand,
holds that the modernist experimentation with disruptive forms implicitly
provides a critique of mass society -- its fragmentation, its estrangement,
its dehumanization. Bertolt Brecht deliberately uses Formalist
strategies -- baring the device, defamiliarization,
and foregrounding -- for Marxist purposes.
Attempting to dissolve the illusion of reification back into the reality
of human action, Brecht insists that historical conditions must not be
seen as mysterious powers but as human action and that the critical attitude
begins when one sees one's own epoch in historical terms. The alienation
effect, which Brecht heralds as the supreme dramatic technique, defamiliarizes
the present in order to divest it of any aura of permanence. By baring
the device and stressing the theatricality of theater, Brecht makes his
auditors aware that objects and institutions, which seem natural because
of their familiarity, are in reality historical. Since they are the products
of change, they become in their turn changeable. Moreover, recent Marxist
criticism incorporates aspects of structuralism
and poststructuralism -- Barthian semiotics,
Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean
deconstruction, and feminist
criticism. Louis Althusser, for example, assimilates structuralism
to Marxism.

Like sociological criticism, Marxist criticism is perpetually oriented
to the social realities that condition works of art. Class status, gender,
ideology, economic conditions, the literary marketplace, the reading public,
and so forth -- all these factors define the dialectical relationship between
literary productions and their sociohistorical contexts.